A conservative civil war over CPAC

Friction between parts of the social conservative and libertarian wings of the conservative movement has escalated into a shooting war in the run-up to the Conservative Political Action Conference, with accusations of embezzlement (true), homosexuality (true), and creeping sharia (disputed) hurled against the 38-year old conservative institution.

CPAC’s leaders respond that its foes’ real gripe is that it won’t give a platform to their lunatic conspiracy theories about presidential birth certificates (disputed).

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But however esoteric the disputes, the fracas has led to real-world repercussions: a move by a group of conservative figures to begin organizing a move to turn the Value Voter Summit, a newer annual event planned for October, into a full-fledged rival to CPAC by shifting its focus toward economic and security issues, according to two participants in the developing strategy. Two of the heavyweight groups of the broader right, the Heritage Foundation and the Media Research Center, have dropped out of CPAC and are expected, planners said, to add to the Value Voter Summit’s heft.

And with CPAC scheduled for Feb. 10, the presidential hopefuls scheduled to speak there – including Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty, and Mitt Romney – will take the stage against the backdrop of a puzzlingly heated intramural conflict.

The proximate cause of the explosion is the inclusion in CPAC of the combative gay conservative group GOProud. But if the sheer intensity of the quarrel seems disproportionate to that seemingly straightforward dispute, that’s because it’s also deeply personal. Long-simmering resentment of two of the leading figures on the economic right, American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene – who runs the event — and Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, who has long been involved in planning it, has morphed into a conflict that carries the special bitterness of a civil war.

“There are a lot of conservatives who see a larger problem with Grover Norquist and David Keene, and they’ve decided to fight it out and CPAC is a proxy for that,” said Erick Erickson, the publisher of RedState.org, who said he won’t be participating in the conference because he wants to stay out of the conflict. “The underlying question is whether the conservative movement still has strong planks for social conservatism and national security conservatism. But it has also become very personal.”

“If you’ve been around this town for a long time, as I have you’ve got people who disagree with you substantively and you’ve got people who don’t like you and if you hang around long enough, their numbers increase,” said Keene, who dismissed many of the attacks as residing in “the fever swamps” of the website WorldNetDaily.

“It’s no secret that some social conservatives are very upset at the idea that there would be any participation by any organization that’s gay, but over the course of the 37 or 38 years that CPAC’s been in existence we’ve had all kinds of people suggest that other people ought to be tossed out,” he said. “Our mission is once a year to allow social, economic, and national security conservatives to come together.”

The differences are among longtime allies. Cleta Mitchell, a campaign finance lawyer who has been a leading internal critic, sits on CPAC’s board. (“ There are issues to be worked out and playing those out in the press doesn’t help from my perspective,” she told POLITICO in a brief e-mail.)

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CORRECTION: Corrected by: Abby McIntyre @ 01/10/2011 10:05 AM
Corrected by: Alex Byers @ 01/08/2011 04:53 PM
An earlier version of this article stated that Grover Norquist does work for corporate clients; he has not had personal clients for a decade, his spokesman said.
BYERS at 453 on 1/08 from Ben
Correction: A previous version of this article identified Suhail Khan as a member of Muslims for America. Khan is a member of ACU's board and has no formal involvement with Muslims for America.
AMCINTYRE at 10:01 a.m. on 1/10 from Ben and Byron